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Humanity is on the cusp of profound discoveries about our cosmic neighborhood. The Universe is knocking on our door just as we are preparing to open it, and the great likelihood is that incontrovertible evidence of extraterrestrial sentient intelligence is just on the threshold.
We need to prepare. We need new instruments of observation and interception. We need far greater transparency, and with it coordination of effort, among scientists and governments. Arising out of that transparency, humanity needs new expectations about how encounters with interstellar objects, and eventually with non-terrestrial life and non-terrestrial civilizations, are likely to unfold. How we prepare, how we as a civilization and a scientific community now behave, will determine the psychological costs and benefits of this new era of sentient terrestrial existence.
We have never been so close to scientifically valid proof that life on Earth and human civilization are not alone in the Universe. I am convinced that we are tantalizingly close not only to learning terrestrial life is not the only life in the Solar system, and that human civilization is not the only civilization to exist or have existed: I am also convinced that most of humanity is not ready.
The times we live in demand that we undertake this search with all the intellect, skill, dedication, and joy we can muster. Not just because we now have evidence that UAP are real, and that some percent of them are perceived threats, and not just because ETCs are increasingly irrefutable, but because we live at a time of ever-mounting alarm over human-made existential threats, from climate change to war. All humans must take up this work because humanity stands at a crossroads. The next steps we, and especially our scientists, take, I am convinced, will decide if our civilization is destined
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In less than two years, the American government went from denying, even belittling, interest in UFOs to rebranding them UAP, declaring them a pressing matter of national concern, and on occasion ordering the military to neutralize some of them.
What is more, we know manufactured technology arriving from interstellar space is plausible because we’ve already sent human-manufactured technology into interstellar space. The effort to answer whether another civilization has done likewise, and perhaps with far greater sophistication, quickly presents us with some of the most awesome, enduring questions of human civilization.
In the family history of all the stars in the Universe, our own is a toddler. Most stars were born billions of years before the Sun. Many are so old they have already consumed their nuclear fuel and cooled off to a compact Earth-sized remnant known as a white dwarf. And of the billions of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy, roughly half host an Earth-sized planet in the zone that would allow for liquid water and the chemistry of life.
In addition, during the very short time span that encompasses human history, entire civilizations—Mesopotamian, Roman, Aztec—have come and gone and now exist only in cultural echoes that merely a few scholars hear, and through archaeological digs. Scale this analogy to the Universe and we can postulate the statistically plausible bet that other civilizations have come and gone, some leaving discoverable echoes and artifacts. And that the few civilizations that might persist could be millions, perhaps billions, of years older than our own.
Put differently, all civilizations that confront the same unchanging natural laws and attempt to understand those laws will be constrained by those same laws as they manufacture technology, and they will tend toward certain common understandings, design choices, and conclusions.
Scientists must and will be at the forefront of positioning humanity to discover life and civilizations in the Universe. And that is why we need to think first of politicians. Before we, and Interstellar, can turn to the science, it is essential that we confront the stumbling blocks to science’s rapid advance.
Scientists know that all science is work in progress. We understand that we cannot trap “truth” in amber. We are always in search of more data, and if we aren’t, more data will inevitably crash into our awareness to wreck premature declarations of certitude.
Long before recorded history, our earliest ancestors looked into the night sky and onto that great, bright, swirling chaos of objects they began to impose order. They saw patterns in the stars that became constellations that represented gods and heroes and sacred beasts. They weaved stories about these patterns into their myths and folklore.
Because science generally, and physics particularly, is going to be the lingua franca of universal sentient intelligence, dark matter is among the terms our new interstellar vocabulary must include for the simple reason that it is likely to be one of the shared subjects we will discuss with an extraterrestrial intelligence.
From the National UFO Reporting Center, which has collected reports since 1974, we analyzed 48,531 sightings from 2010 to 2020 sent in from some ten thousand cities and towns. We found unusually high numbers of reports in ten counties in seven states from the east coast to the west. These were arrived at by regression analysis, which, of course, asserts and assumes no causality. It also provides no guidance on why these areas are “hot,” or even if, after study, they are in fact.
For the most part, twenty-first-century humans took the lesson: what the dinosaurs didn’t know, killed them. In 2005, the United States Congress tasked NASA with tracking 90% of all near-Earth objects 140 meters or larger.
Small objects enter Earth’s atmosphere all the time. NASA guesses that about 100 tons of material, mostly dust and gravel, do so daily. Few of them are interstellar. And few of them are of a size to make an impressive explosion. On December 18, 2018, for example, a meteor spotted off the Kamchatka Peninsula on the far eastern edge of Russia produced a blast 16 miles above the Earth’s surface that released ten times the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. It was estimated to be about 10 meters in diameter and weigh about 1,600 tons, and to be the third largest meteor to impact Earth since
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The Willamette Meteorite, weighing in at 15.5 tons and on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, is metallic iron likely formed from the collision of two protoplanets orbiting the Sun billions of years ago. It is surmised that the Willamette is what was left of one planet’s iron-nickel core after its encounter with Earth. Just the fact that it is iron, however, makes it rare. Iron meteorites make up about a twentieth of all space rocks arriving on Earth.
There are few certainties in life, but one is that someday humanity, if it wants to persist, will need to leave this planet. The cosmic clock is ticking. In a few billion years, the Sun will begin to die and life as we know it on Earth will perish. For humanity, the clock to a partial or complete extinction is likely ticking far faster.
Yet biological conditions on Earth are likely replicated in nearly sextillion (10 to the power of 21) habitable exoplanets within the observable volume of the Universe.
Our civilization’s management of the upcoming few centuries will likely decide if our future timeline is measurable in eons, or not.
The opposite of war is cooperation, best exemplified by the scientific culture.
The long history of life on Earth offers repeat confirmation that it is impossible to save all lives. The shears of chance and stupidity confirm that not only do species go extinct, but that 99% of the four billion species (give or take) that evolved on Earth have gone extinct6. Stars die, black holes digest galaxies, and large meteors could wipe out most planetary life. Against this relentless churn of physical laws stands the possibilities embodied by intelligent civilization.
From the Kepler satellite data on exoplanets we know that a substantial fraction of Sun-like stars have a planet the size of the Earth roughly at the same separation. Since most of these stars formed billions of years before the Sun, the dice of intelligent life was rolled tens of billions of times within our own Milky Way galaxy alone. It is very likely that Albert Einstein was not the smartest scientist that has lived in the Milky Way since the Big Bang.
